


Been Away A While

by waltzmatildah



Category: Grey's Anatomy
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-02
Updated: 2017-05-02
Packaged: 2018-10-26 22:20:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 919
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10795893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waltzmatildah/pseuds/waltzmatildah
Summary: A chance meeting over liquor and high heels.





	Been Away A While

Her feet hurt. Too many hours in too tall heels and Erica can't quite recall the moment when she became that person.

The person with the impractical shoes and the sunken knowledge that no one is even looking at them anymore

She slides soundlessly onto the smooth stool at the bar, vows to prop herself there with a glass of something shallow and cloudy. Lose herself in the swirl of the liquid and forget the whole day. Maybe even the whole week.

She's placed her order, is tapping neatly trimmed nail tips against the damp runner as the twenty something bartender adds a twist of lime she doesn't remember requesting to the gin that she so very clearly does. The bar is slow for a Friday night, more empty than it is anything else as the filtered strains of something infinitely more modern than she can ever pretend to have been melts effortlessly into the soft lighting and muffled chat.

There's a stool to her left. Her coat slung casually across the unoccupied seat, as though maybe she's saving the spot for a friend.

She's not.

She meets the jagged reflection of the woman to her right in the fragmented mirror that backs the liquor racks. The blonde is less blonde than she remembers, sharp and unfamiliar in a way that is still wholly etched into her synapses.

They notice each other at the same time she thinks, twin stares curved around a bottle of something iridescent blue.

Blink. A beat.

Thousands of questions dip and swing on her tongue. They all start and end the same way...

_Callie..._

Except for one.

“What are you doing here, Stevens?”

And she's not yet sure whether she's interested in the answer.

Doubts it.

But the misery etched into the shadows of the familiar face is an intriguing prospect and there are parts of her that want nothing more than to envelope themselves in the depths of someone else's chaos and uncertainty.

Figures it'll make a nice change from the heated boil of her own.

Shoulders lift in a shrug. As though the raising of them holds all the answers Erica could ever need and then some. A soft smile that is older than she remembers.

Colder.

_Wiser._

“Doctor Hahn.” A greeting, incongruous with the raised shoulders.

Erica brings her glass to her lips. Tips the rim in the direction of the other woman in lieu of having to form her own version of _hello, it's been a while, thanks for ruining my life._

She's still beautiful. Despite the blonde that isn't quite so blonde and the tired smile that barely ghosts the curves of her face. A timeless kind of grace.

Echoes and silence.

“No seriously, what are you doing here, Stevens?”

Figures the fact they're in a bar in Columbia, South Carolina makes the question a legitimate one, all things considered.

“Working,” comes the one word reply. Her eyes don't lift from the tapping, tapping, tapping of her toe tip against the metal leg of the stool.

“Lexington?” Discounts Providence immediately as they'd have run into each other before now.

A nod.

“Good. It's a good hospital.” She can feel her lips still moving, solid around the words. Calculates them as the most syllables she uttered outside the white-washed walls of the OR in about a week.

And even the sound of her own voice is a foreign reverberation in her ears.

The rage she'd managed to hold onto in the immediate months and cold years following her departure from Seattle Grace has faded to bitter nothing. She doubts she could conjure it even if she wanted to.

“What the hell happened back then?” And she knows it could be a question about any number of things. Figures Stevens can interpret the sentence any way she likes...

“George died.”

She ticks them off, one by one by one in her head.

Yang, Karev, Grey, Stevens... _O'Malley._

“Oh...” An expulsion of air more than a deliberate vocalisation. “There was a shooting. I remember--”

“No. Before then.”

“Oh...” Again.

“So much happened before then.”

They lapse back into uncomfortable silence. As though the scant information is more than enough to have her filling in the expansive gaps.

And she guesses that it probably is.

Life happened after all.

“I'm sorry.”

A non sequitur.

Only, not really. They both know precisely what it is she's apologising for.

It's Erica's turn to shrug.

“Not for what I did,” Izzie continues, loses the words into the last swallow of her wine. “But I am sorry. I don't really--”

She trails off abruptly. Erica lets her. Rolls her finger idly through the condensation beading the base of her glass.

“Do you still keep in touch with any of the others?” She's itching to be more specific but understands the futility of the words and so doesn't.

“Just Meredith really...”

A beat.

“And Bailey. At Christmas mostly. I send her a card, sometimes a letter- I had cancer once--” Erica feels her eyelids bounce closed and then open again at the words. She risks turning her head.

“Stage four metastatic melanoma.” A false grin at the revelation. “Go me.”

“Jesus.” _Jesus_. She knows the survival rates.

“I know. And, to be honest, that's not even half the story...”

Erica glances up, catches the eye of the glass polishing bartender some steps to their left, communicates with a nod and a raised eyebrow and manages to order herself a re-fill.

Calculates that she's probably going to need it.


End file.
